Entertainment and architectural lighting has been dominated by incandescent and other conventional sources, which have well-known drawbacks. In recent years, solid-state illumination sources, especially light emitting diodes (LEDs), have been presented in order to solve many of these drawbacks. However, they have not been effectively utilized to their fullest potential. Although LEDs have long life and high luminous efficiency, these properties alone do not provide an adequate solution for the demanding applications of entertainment and architectural lighting.
The most common illumination and display devices use three source colors—red, green, and blue. The intensities of these source colors can be varied to produce different target colors. With three source colors there are well known methods for calculating the ratio of intensities that will produce a target color. Mixing more than three colors to form a target color is significantly more complex.